Holbein’s Wit Pictorial Ingenuity in Renaissance Art Alexander Marr   Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543) is renowned as an outstandingly realistic painter—the acme of Renaissance naturalism. In fact, he was a purveyor of cunning ambiguity. Holbein’s Wit: Pictorial Ingenuity in Renaissance Art reveals the artist at play, juggling the uncertainties and paradoxes that arise in the enterprise…

The Lutheran Middle Ages The Survival of Medieval Art in Protestant Churches in Germany By Justin Kroesen The wealth of medieval art found in Germany’s Protestant churches is unparalleled; contrary to what is generally believed, Lutherans were often tolerant to medieval church interiors, maintaining or altering the use of furnishings and images or simply accepting…

Rubens’s Questions Religion, Paragone, and the Ontology of Painting By Koenraad Jonckheere Rubens’s Questions: Religion, Paragone, and the Ontology of Painting explores the pivotal role of doubt in understanding the work of Peter Paul Rubens. Focusing on his easel paintings from the 1610s, this book argues that Rubens engaged with the era’s most pressing intellectual debates…

The Burgeoning European Print Trade The Distribution of Prints via the Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp By Karen L. Bowen, Dirk Imhof The European print trade is an evocative topic. Not only art historians, but social, cultural, and economic historians all agree that it was of vital importance in the Early Modern Period, as the conveyer…

Gardens in Revolution Landscapes & Political Culture in France, 1760-1792 Gabriel Wick France in the mid-1760s witnessed what the aphorist and garden lover the prince de Ligne hailed as “La révolution du goût” – the revolution of taste. A small number of dissident and philosophically minded aristocrats remade their gardens in the bizarre and eccentric…

Architecture of Knowledge Hawksmoor and Oxford By Eleonora Pistis Awarded with the 2025 Berger Prize (The Walpole Society) This annual prize  celebrates brilliant writing and scholarship about the arts and architecture of the United Kingdom. Awarded since 2002, the prize is offered by The Walpole Society through the generosity and inspiration of the Berger Collection…